Category Archives: ableton

Pretty cool little 18 min documentary put together by the nice folks at Ableton about the band Battles. Check out their process writing and recording and see how they all work separately, but then together.

Here’s a brand new song of mine that I made in Ableton Live Intro and Vocoloid with Cyber Diva and Hasuni Miku. The drums and bass were heavily influenced by the song “Key” by Yellow Magic Orchestra. The lyrics were inspired by the comic book, The Atlantis Chronicles by Peter David and Esteban Maroto published by DC Comics 1990.

The basic concept was simple, make a YMO inspired track with Vocaloid singing. The Atlantis concept came afterwards. I’m always obsessed with the legend of Atlantis anyway, and I recently read The Atlantis Chronicles (highly recommended). So when I was trying to think of things to write lyrics about, that’s what I came up with.

For the video I used about 15 or 20 stills I took at various oceans, aquariums, beaches, and watery places I’ve been to over the years, and a couple of my drawings, then used footage from the PC game Atlantis: The Lost Tales – 1997, played by youtuber PeteRoy. I first took all the stills and animated the TV simulator plugin in Sony Movie Studo Platinum, then chroma-keyed the footage from Atlantis:The Lost Tales, over it in what I thought was interesting ways.

The music was composed and mixed entirely in Ableton using Ableton’s synths, samples, and plugins, then I mixed the vocals right in the Vocaloid editor. I mastered it in Audacity.

I think I’ve finally finished the geeky gigs series. I realized after making this last video that the past 5 videos before that were fitting together more so than the rest of the geeky gigs series. So I took those vids and this brand new one and put together a new playlist titled “Vaporphonics”. This is mostly my take on Vaporwave/Plunderphonics. I think Vaporwave is a genre that is still being developed, and that’s one of the reasons I’m having so much fun with these.

There’s still a lot of people out there that don’t take it seriously. I will admit to getting annoyed with the genre myself when I kept hear so many poor examples or it, or just ones that weren’t really serious in themselves and simply slowing down other tracks from the 90s.

That’s not what I’m doing in these tracks. Yes there’s a lot of pitched down samples, but I’m trying to use more original material for mine, as well as chopping the samples in unpredictable ways. Like using odd spaces in between beats and tails of hits rather than the hits themselves, which is how most beats are chopped. This song, as well as the rest of the tracks in the Vaporphonics playlist will be part of a new album I’m putting together.